“Asleep at the Wheel” would have been a snappier title. “Idling for Dollars.” “Paid to Park.”

Rather than following a few city work crews around and capturing video of union truck drivers sitting in their cabs dozing, snacking and reading the newspaper at better than $30 an hour, Ferguson and his team combed through city contracts and conducted field interviews to establish just what the responsibilities are, department by department, division by division for the 1,400 to 1,800 city truck drivers.

The conclusion: About 200 of them have phony-baloney jobs.

These 200 drivers, whose annual total compensation package averages $90,000, transport laborers and equipment to work sites and then "do not participate" in the task at hand, as the 57-page report says. Instead they sit by, sometimes all day, waiting to make the next or return trip.

They may be loafing, but they aren't neglecting their duty. Sitting by is their duty. And they're bound by contracts that decree "any work which has been traditionally performed by employees who are represented by the union shall continue to be performed by said employees."

This means, for instance, that union truck drivers "typically pick up recycling alone from the 37 community recycling sites," says the report. "However, if any recycling material is on the ground at these sites, the (truck drivers) must be accompanied by a laborer to pick up the material on the ground."

The report argues that the city would save nearly $18 million if the responsibilities of drivers and laborers could be combined. If the pest-control experts drove themselves around. If members of the streetlight-repair crews could learn to operate their own trucks. If drivers would load and unload cargo and equipment.

Easier said than done, countered Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the city's Law Department.

Yes, it was the city that, during boom times several years ago, approached the Teamsters and about three dozen other employee unions and sought the 10-year contracts that lock in waste and inefficiency into 2017. Yes it was the City Council that unanimously and without much apparent discussion OK'd the terms of this effort to secure labor peace through the 2016 Summer Olympics that Chicago was then still hoping to get.

However, Hoyle said, negotiating changes in the long-standing work rules would have been "extraordinarily difficult" and sparked demands for major concessions from the city. "It wasn't and isn't a realistic suggestion," she said.

What's lacking in this response and in a similar response in a news release from the city's budget director, Eugene Munin, is any sense of anger over the idea that the cash-strapped city employs 200 truck drivers it doesn't need

But to give you an idea of how hard it will be to remove unneeded drivers off the payroll, Teamsters' spokesman Brian Rainville denies they are unneeded.

"You don't know how hard they work," he said of the drivers. He blasted the inspector general's investigators as "desk jockeys whose job is to find things that are wrong," even though the report found that roughly 7 out of 8 city truck drivers are integral to operations.

I asked him straight out: Is there any truth to the IG's finding that there are drivers who basically spend all day, every day, just sitting in their trucks?

"No," he said.

Rainville's posture: The city wanted this deal, and pushed for it even over the initial resistance of the Teamsters. In labor negotiations, "the expectation is that you honor your agreements," he said.

In short, even if the city asks (which it won't), the union will not reopen negotiations to eliminate inefficiencies in the city's truck-driver program (because there aren't any).

And this is just a wee taste of the frustration we're likely to feel in the future as Ferguson proceeds to put more of these 10-year contracts — as well as the often hidden "side-letter" agreements that shape them — under his microscope.

The raft of unusually lengthy labor agreements — three to four years is standard — are the rotting carcass in the refrigerator that outgoing 5th Floor City Hall tenant Mayor Richard Daley is leaving for the new tenant, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel.

Now there's a guy who has a job to do.

(background, including full response statements and extended excerpts from the report, may be found here) (Tribune editorial on this issue is here)

Steve Chapman makes the case today for the concealed-carry bill now in Springfield:

The Violence Policy Center in Washington claims that since May 2007, individuals licensed to carry guns killed 286 private citizens and 11 law enforcement officers and committed 18 mass shootings. This gory record, it asserts, destroys the myth that permit-holders are generally law-abiding folks who behave responsibly.

In fact, VPC's own data, when inspected closely, doesn't dent the case for gun rights. Over the past four years, there have been more than 60,000 homicides in the United States. The slayings carried out by permit-holders amount to fewer than one of every 200 murders. For every licensee who killed someone, there are more than 20,000 who didn't.

After I wrote my column backing this legislation, I heard from opponents who sniffed that they, in implicit contrast to me, were all about an "evidence based" approach to the often emotional issue of guns. Good for them. But it was a look at the evidence that first turned me around on this issue, and a look at the evidence that underscores Chapman's column.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The term "American exceptionalism" has been appearing in many political arguments lately -- who believes in it? does President Obama believe in it? -- but I'm not sure what it means to those who are using it.

Before you give me your answer in comments, here are portions of the musings of two writers on the subject.

Nearly $18 million could be saved by getting rid of 200 City of Chicago truck drivers who spend parts of their work day loafing or even sleeping , according to a report by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson.

The recommended number of layoffs is about the same as the number of drivers who spend their days doing nothing more than taking other workers to job sites and waiting while those workers do their assigned tasks, according to the report. The inefficiencies are essentially locked in place by a long-term city labor contract that makes change nearly impossible, the report concluded.

Key passage:

The primary reason for the extra truck drivers is a city contract with Teamsters Local 700 that makes it very difficult, and in the case of contractors nearly impossible, to transfer truck driver responsibilities to other employees, according to the report. The 10-year contract does not expire until June 2017.

Mayor Richard Daley in 2007 entered long-term contracts with the city’s unions to eliminate any chance of labor strife as Chicago launched its ultimately unsuccessful bid on the 2016 Summer Olympics. City revenues peaked that year.

The national economy tanked not long after that and Chicago, like other cities across the nation, was faced mounting financial struggles. When Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel takes office in May, he faces city budget shortfalls that could top $1 billion a year.

“By signing a 10-year (contract) with the Teamsters (and with over 30 other unions representing city employees), the current administration and City Council unduly hamstrung not only the current management of city government, but the next six years of management as well, a period that extends well beyond the elected terms of the incoming administration and City Council,” Ferguson’s report states.

UPDATE:

Teamsters spokesman Brian Rainville said it was the Daley administration, not the Teamsters, that wanted the 10-year deal. It would not be fair to go back on it now, he said.

“The city agreed to the contract because that’s what they wanted,” he said. “When the city was in boom times, did we say, ‘Hey, let’s open this up, you guys are flush?’ ”

Rainville also disputed Ferguson’s contention that the city could eliminate the jobs of 200 truck drivers, contending the city is short on needed drivers because of its tight budget. Cutting the jobs could result in more time and an overall cost increase to taxpayers, he said.

The City of Chicago responded today to the Inspector General Office’s (IGO) report regarding motor truck drivers and the collective bargaining process.

The IGO report suffers from a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of collective bargaining, the laws governing union-employer relations, and the dynamics of the negotiation process,” said Eugene L. Munin, City of Chicago Budget Director.

The City stated that the IGO’s recommendations with respect to changes in collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) such as limiting the duration of CBAs, and prohibiting the negotiation of interim agreements, would all severely hamstring the City’s flexibility in negotiations, and its ability to work with the unions to respond to operational needs as they arise.

“Had the IGO’s office any substantive knowledge of the contracts or talked to those with knowledge, they would know that COUPE agreements, including Teamsters, do contain contract reopening provisions in several areas,” Munin added.

Munin pointed out that, on the most fundamental level, merely shortening the length of a contract does not impact the City’s ability to achieve efficiencies.

“The suggestion to track CBA’s along the terms of elected officials would also unnecessarily politicize the union negotiation process. In fact, we think it is a totally irresponsible and naïve suggestion that would greatly empower employee unions to push candidates to protect union benefits, instead of protecting taxpayers,” said Munin.

He also said the report completely ignores or is apparently unaware of the numerous gains in collective bargaining the administration has made over the years, with the cooperation of the unions, providing the City with enhanced operational flexibility, and in response to financial pressures on the City’s budget. It also fails to recognize the comprehensive, ongoing analysis that the City’s OBM and operating departments do undertake throughout the negotiation process.

Munin said the “traditional work” clause, which is referred to in much of the report, is not just common to City CBAs, but is virtually universal in collective bargaining. He said that no marginally-competent union would ever agree to a CBA that did not contain such a clause.

The components of what is considered “traditional work” were negotiated in the mid-1980’s. And as is common in all union agreements – work rules and benefits already been negotiated for by unions are typically not given up without some other compensation – the definition of negotiation.

Even as the IGO says that side agreements are not a good idea, they contradict themselves when recognizing that a side agreement was the critically-important vehicle through which the City successfully gained concessions saving Chicago taxpayers $70M through the COUPE agreement, whereby nearly 30 unions agreed to these cost-cutting measures.

“In reality, these side letters do constitute an ‘opening’ of the contract, and any person with institutional knowledge of labor agreements knows that side letters typically benefit management,” added Munin.

Because of their lack of understanding of the City’s collective bargaining agreements, the IGO fails to recognize the work rule improvements for MTD’s that the City has negotiated to protect taxpayers in the last several years, though both the CBA process and side letters, including:

In negotiations for the 2003-2007 CBAs with the Trades (including the Teamsters), the City was able to negotiate a memorandum of agreement affording the City enhanced flexibility in scheduling weekend and off-shift work at straight time rates.

During the same negotiations, the City was able to negotiate “break-in” rates for MTDs, allowing the City to hire new MTDs at 80% of the regular MTD rate in the first year, and 90% in the second year.

MTD’s who have been injured on duty are now brought back to work to drive smaller rodent control vehicles (rather than being paid to stay at home), freeing other drivers to drive the larger equipment

I see very little in the city's response to address the major problem highlighted in the report, which suggests that the City allowed excessively lax work rules to be written into the Teamsters' contract.

UPDATE III. Here's more from Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the Law Department, which negotiates these contracts. This came via email after she and I spoke Thursday afternoon about this topic:

I wasn’t trying to suggest that there’s nothing that we can do in these negotiations to change job duties or work rules or that we’ve thrown up our hands and caved in to the union on these matters. However, our position is more moderate and (we believe) realistic—it falls between throwing up our hands and giving in and simply trying to do away with the traditional work rules clauses as a whole. When a CBA terminates, the parties don’t start from scratch. You start from the existing status quo and any changes in that status quo have to be specifically bargained for in order to be legal. That’s why it’s extraordinarily difficult for employers to “claw back” and obtain a concessionary contract. It’s a major victory to maintain the status quo.

The traditional work clause has worked to the City’s benefit in cases in which we’ve had to assign new tasks—we’ve been able to argue that those tasks have not traditionally been performed by Teamsters.

We go into the negotiating process with the goal of gaining concessions that will give the City greater flexibility and I think we’ve been successful doing that in all of our contracts

Sony Music...was upset by Amazon's decision to launch the service without new licenses for music streaming...

Amazon beat rivals Google and Apple Inc into the market for such "music locker'' services, which are meant to appeal to consumers frustrated by the complexities of storing their favorite songs at work, home and on their smartphones....

In 2007, EMI sued MP3tunes, which offered a similar service. Consumers are allowed to store music files on their own computers, but it is unclear whether they have that right when they use remote storage services offered by cloud computing...... Although Amazon's service lets users listen to music from most computers or phones regardless of where they bought the song, it will not work on Apple's iPhones or have an "app'' on that company's devices.

A free enterprise think tank in Michigan -- backed by some of the biggest names in national conservative donor circles -- has made a broad public records request to at least three in-state universities with departments that specialize in the study of labor relations, seeking all their emails regarding the union battle in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

I wouldn't be surprised if this fishing expedition turns up a trove of unguarded comments. The candor and personal nature of e-mail sent on official accounts -- through public institutions or private business addresses -- reflects the false sense of privacy many people feel when using their employer's email.

Those numbers may be about to get worse: A proposal filed Monday in the Illinois House would give the state teachers pension fund $2.4 billion in the next fiscal year, and the Chicago teachers pension fund just $10.5 million

Who makes up the inevitable shortfall in the city? Those who, like me, pay Chicago property taxes, naturally. Which would be fine if our state income taxes weren't also going to infuse billions into suburban and downstate teachers pension funds.

Suburban and downstate school districts, meanwhile, are contributing less than one-sixth of 1 percent of the overall annual pension obligations.

This greatly insulates suburban and downstate taxpayers from the long-term pension impacts of raising annual teachers' salaries; impacts that city taxpayers feel directly.

"Many people find this to be surprising," said Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, as he explained the above during a speech Friday at the Union League Club.

That's one word for it. Outrageous is another. Unconscionable. Baffling.

City residents are in effect being double taxed — forced to support not only their own teachers pension fund but also the funds for suburban and downstate districts that don't pull their weight.

Those who follow the dizzying issue of pensions tell me that the inequities go back to the mid-1990s when Chicago was given control of its public schools. Part of the deal was that property taxes that had been directed to pensions would instead go directly into school operations. Another part of the deal was that the General Assembly would make it a "goal and intention" each year to give the city teachers pension fund 20 percent to 30 percent of the amount allocated for the suburban/downstate teachers pension fund.

This "goal and intention" was a sham. Lawmakers hit 23 percent the first year, fiscal year 1995, but the state's annual investment fell fairly steadily ever since, and next year's proposal is for less than half of 1 percent.

And who's going to raise hell about it? Most taxpayers don't understand these shell games — I spent the better part of two days reading up on this issue and talking to experts, and I feel as though I barely grasp the intricacies.

Teachers — who don't receive Social Security and whose pensions are not particularly generous, by the way — have very little incentive to sound the alarm over pension-funding schemes because attempts to fix tomorrow's looming problems are likely to curtail salary increases today.(Though Chicago Teachers Pension Fund sounded the alarm Tuesday)

And lawmakers recognize you can't reset the scales without getting some constituency riled up.

ere, for instance, the logical solution — the one Cullerton has been lofting as a trial balloon — is to compel downstate and suburban school districts to pay the full price for their teachers pension programs each year, and no longer allow them to pass the obligation along to the rest of us, particularly the hapless, abused taxpayers of Chicago.

"They should start picking up the cost," Cullerton said in his speech. "That would help the state's overall budget picture tremendously."

How much help? If Cullerton's plan had been in place in fiscal year 2010, it would have saved the state a little more than $700 million, according to figures provided by his office. Why only $700 million? Because two-thirds of the money we now funnel into the state teachers pension fund is to make up for past underfunding, a burden Illinois will continue to shoulder no matter what.

Of course, the $700 million obligation won't vanish under Cullerton's plan, which is not yet even in bill form. Suburban and downstate districts will have to find some way to pony up their share, probably with some combination of increased local property taxes and diminished school services.

I played 5,040 holes, beating the Guinness record (for most holes of miniature golf in 24 hours) by 311. The 5,040 holes included 570 holes-in-one. My scores ranged from 32 to 47, with only 19 of the 280 rounds above par (42) and an overall average score of 38.66.

Commenter Brian made a good point when he wrote of Obama's decision re. Libya, "You listen to your expert advisers and do what you think is best. .... just don't presume to think there was an easy, clear cut answer."

There were no great answers or easy decisions. We were looking at an imminent slaughter of significant proportions as threatened by a ruthless dictator who has shown little compunction about slaughtering people. I doubt history will show otherwise.

We helped assemble a coalition to put a stop to that slaughter, fully aware that it's not obvious how you intervene in something like that and then get out of it while leaving things better than they were.

Just because one is anti-war doesn't mean one must have a Quaker default. It's consonant with the ideals of peace to use military might at times to attempt to protect innocents and prevent massacres.

And just because the exit strategy or end game isn't clear doesn't mean a nation must always stand on the sidelines and avert its eyes to preventable horrors.

The case for not attempting the no-fly zone seems to be:

1, We're not splintering our lance on every problem in the world, so why this one?

2. We don't know who the rebels are, exactly, so may not get a good swap even if we rout Ghadafi.

3. It's not in our vital national interest to spend treasure and political capital if not spill blood in what looks very much like a Third World civil war.

Maybe NATO/Obama/the US will get lucky and Ghadafi will be routed in under a month and a western style Democracy will bloom, though I doubt that very much.

What I'd like to read on this thread is some fill-in-the-blanks on this:

If I had been president and been confronted with the situation in Libya, I would have ______________ because _______________ .

The State of Illinois is on the verge of passing an appropriation bill which woefully underfunds the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund.

Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan filed an amendment to Illinois House Bill 3639 which further cuts CTPF funding to $10.4 million while providing more than $2.5 billion in funding for the downstate Teachers' Retirement System. Read the full text of the amendment here.

An Unsustainable Pattern

In 2010, the State cut CTPF funding by 50% to $32.5 million. Today, the State is proposing an additional 68% cut in CTPF funding, an 85% reduction in funding from 2009 levels.

"The state cannot continue to ignore its obligations to Chicago's teachers. Legislators should uphold their stated goal of funding CTPF at a rate of between 20 and 30% of the monies allocated to the downstate (TRS) system instead of further cutting our revenue," remarked Kevin B. Huber, executive director, CTPF. "This bill funds CTPF at less than .05% of what TRS will receive. This simply isn't fair to Chicago's teachers or taxpayers. It has to be fixed."

Almost every governor who’s tried to deliver a take-your-medicine message has paid a price. And widespread polling data suggests a chasm between what Americans say they want and the price they’re prepared to pay to get there.

In Ohio, Republican Gov. John Kasich’s approval rating stood at just 30 percent last week....In Connecticut, Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy... clocked a 35-percent approval,... in Wisconsin, a poll for the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found ...67 percent said they opposed reducing aid to municipalities and schools and 66 percent said they were opposed to firing state employees....both Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, both in their third month in office, are in negative approval territory.

Amazon.com Inc. ... launched two offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The first lets you upload and store files such as music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC. The second lets you play songs you've uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software. The "cloud" in the services' names refers to the practice of storing content online and streaming it to a computer over the Internet

Google Inc. and Apple Inc. also are believed to be working on similar services to allow consumers to store and access music and other content when away from their home computer.

While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it's offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage.

I'm a big fan of this trend and have been using Dropbox (2.2 gigs of free storage) since last fall with great satisfaction. As others have observed, the computer revolution started off with desktop "terminals" connected to mainframes, evolved into self-contained desktops with hundreds of gigs of storage including resident programs, and now seems to be headed back to the terminal model.

Roger Ebert explains his often disquieting (to readers and followers) and now concluding experiment "to see how a web site might hope to make money."

Amazon has this deal where you register as an Amazon Associate and get a percentage from anyone who comes to Amazon and buys something through your coded link....You see where that could lead. I went into a frenzy of salesmanship. ... I had these neat notions I wanted to try out on my website, and the Sun-Times had little spare change for such ideas ...

Amazon is discontinuing the program in Illinois and Ebert concedes "it wasn't dignified."

It was also jarring. Ebert is an elegant writer and respected thinker -- a local treasure -- and to see him periodically transformed into Mr. Haney from "Green Acres" on his Twitter feed was therefore particularly disturbing.

Journalists don't shill for products. Even those of us paid to dispense opinions have a pact with our readers/audience that we're disinterested parties, and that when we can't avoid conflicts of interest we do our best to disclose them and regret them.

But perhaps -- and this is the suggestion I pull from Ebert's essay linked above -- this is old-school thinking. Journalism in the defunded, internet era can't afford this sort of attempted purity, and readers/followers grasp that so intuitively that a combination of serious commentary and hucksterism will come to fit as well in print as it now does on talk radio.

Speaking of intuitive, have I told you about the automatic tomato planter...?

Chicago’s population reached 2.8 million in 2009. The City is broken down into 50 districts, or wards, each with its own alderman to represent it in City Council. That gives each alderman roughly 57,000 constituents to represent.

In contrast, New York City has 51 City Council members, and each of those represent over 164,000 constituents. Los Angeles City Council members are only 15 in number, representing over 250,000 constituents each.

A look at the 10 most populous cities in the country reveals a similar finding—each have a higher number than Chicago of constituents represented by each city council seat....

Does anyone want to argue that city services are better in Chicago than in these top 10 cities? Or that centralizing city services isn't the most fair and efficient way of allocating them?

Currently, a ward superintendent who receives an average of $90,000 a year runs each ward. They manage garbage collection, snow removal, and the blue cart recycling program within their wards, and only within their wards. Even if it would make more sense for a garbage truck to continue its pick up down, say, a one way street, ward boundaries—not common sense or efficiency—dictate the route.

The idea that 50 aldermen create a stronger, more theoretically independent political body than 25 aldermen doesn't strike me as intuitively correct. The more constituents any elected official represents, the more power he or she has; the more diluted the power of any one alderman, the more concentrated power is at the top.

Think I'm wrong? Imagine the reflexive howls from the reflexive critics if mayor-elect Emanuel had proposed doubling the size of the council instead of halving it: He's trying to weaken any potential opponents! He's simply trying to reduce the impact of any negative votes out there and make it easier for him and his operatives and his money to control individual aldermanic districts.

We believe in Chicago exceptionalism. There is no reason to look at how other cities do it, start from zero and try to hammer out an agreement on the optimal size of the Council. Chicago was blessed long ago to have chosen the perfect number of aldermen. Even when the population shrinks, the ratio of aldermen to citizens remains ideal and immutable. Change is bad. Re-thinking or re-imagining that at this point is unthinkable.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.